Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions Leor Zmigrod1,2,3 & Amit Goldenberg4 Affiliations: 1Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 2Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 3Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 4Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Contact: Dr Leor Zmigrod, [email protected], +44 7522193934. Paper accepted and in press at Current Directions in Psychological Science. Can be tempo- rarily cited as: Zmigrod, L., & Goldenberg, A. (2020). Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions. Current Directions in Psychological Sci- ence. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/w3hj6 1 Abstract Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? While traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity attributes, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in individuals’ idiosyncratic cognitive and affective dispositions. This paper synthesizes cutting-edge evidence demonstrating that an individual’s cognitive and affective architecture shape their willingness to support ideological violence. From a cognitive perspective, traits such as cognitive rigidity, slower perceptual strategies, and poorer executive functions are linked to heightened endorsement for ideological violence. From an emotional standpoint, characteristics associated with emotional reactivity and impaired emotional regulation, such as sensation-seeking and impulsivity, can facilitate readiness for extreme political action. The review hones in on the roles of cognitive rigidity and sensation-seeking as traits heightening proclivities for extreme pro-group behavior, and recommends that future research should aim to assess cognition-emotion interactions to reveal different sub-profiles of political actors. A theoretical framework focused on cognitive and affective information-processing traits – and their interactions – opens up tractable empirical questions and a future research agenda. Identifying subsets of ideologues is an endeavor with potential to inform the design of evidence-based interventions aimed at reducing ideological extremism and fostering social understanding. Extreme political action; ideology; cognition; emotion; political psychology; cognition- emotion interactions 2 Psychological Theories of Extreme Political Action In his brilliant 1951 book The True Believer, the thinker Eric Hoffer pondered why some people are more likely than others to engage in extreme ideological action – action that promotes violence against others in the name of a group or cause. Who is most likely to participate in the behaviors of extreme or fanatical ideologies? Hoffer theorized the root of radicalization lied in low self-esteem and frustration, in the desire to discard and forget oneself by immersing in a larger collective. Since then, over the last 70 years, research has moved away from the self-esteem hypothesis towards a more systematic study of how contexts and motivations shape individuals’ willingness to participate in extreme political action. Prominent psychological theories frequently concentrate on identity and situational factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic circumstance, level of hardship, or the individual’s sense of efficacy, empowerment, or identification with the group (Drury & Reicher, 2005; Van Zomeren et al., 2008). Other theoretical accounts center on high-level motivational factors, specifically on how general human motivations to experience coherence, certainty, and connectedness, can drive individuals to join ideological groups and movements (Jost, Ledgerwood, & Hardin, 2008; Douglas, Sutton, & Cichocka, 2017). These theoretical perspectives have generated important insights about how social, economic, and existential conditions can amplify an individual’s proneness to engage in extreme ideological action. Nonetheless, these lines of research have sometimes overlooked the contribution of deeply-rooted generalized individual differences that are internally embedded in the individual’s brain architecture, and not necessarily shared by all. These traits reflect the individual’s way of processing and evaluating information in general, in their everyday interactions with the world, with any kind of stimuli across a variety of domains, rather than in the specific context of politics. These individual-level attributes are often unconscious and 3 grounded in biological idiosyncrasies in how brains operate, leading to slight – but significant – variations in how different individuals perceive stimuli and make decisions (Miyake & Friedman, 2012). Given the abundance of socio-political opinions and decisions humans form throughout their lifetime, it is thus fruitful to ask whether such implicit information- processing tendencies affect individuals’ propensities for political action. Here we will synthesize recent research suggesting that susceptibility to extreme political action is sculpted by an individual’s biologically-rooted cognitive and affective architecture, not only by their situational and motivational characteristics. Cognition refers to information processing of neutral stimuli in the service of decision-making (e.g. how individuals process visual shapes and judge them according to task instructions) whereas emotion is engaged in processing emotionally-valenced or emotionally-provocative stimuli (e.g. how individuals evaluate fearful or disgusted faces). Although most psychological processes are infused with both cognitive and affective components, for example memory or learning from rewards and punishments, we make this stimulus-oriented distinction for the sake of simplicity and clarity, in accordance with cognitive psychology conventions (Zajonc, 1984). We will further argue that future research should address nuanced cognition-emotion interactions and that this can shed light on the origins of extreme ideological action and the multitude of heterogeneous actors that it attracts. Cognitive Underpinnings of Extreme Political Action Individual differences in proclivities for extreme political action have been shown to relate to implicit cognitive characteristics across multiple psychological domains. One information-processing style that has been illustrated as a core correlate of ideological thought is cognitive rigidity. Cognitive rigidity is marked by a difficulty to adapt behavior in response to changing environments, task demands, and reward contingencies. Cognitively 4 inflexible individuals perform more poorly on tasks such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) or the Alternative Uses Test which require participants to process and respond to visual or linguistic stimuli in an adaptable manner. For instance, in the WCST, participants are instructed to sort cards according to their shape, color, or other visual feature. The card- sorting rule then changes, and individuals who are cognitively flexible are able to change their behavior in accordance with the new rule, while rigid individuals struggle to adapt to the new task demands. Individuals who exhibit cognitive inflexibility in these objective neuropsychological tasks also possess more ideological and dogmatic worldviews (Zmigrod, 2020) in the realm of nationalism (Zmigrod, Rentfrow, & Robbins, 2018), politics (Zmigrod, Rentfrow, & Robbins, 2020; Van Hiel et al., 2016), religiosity (Zmigrod et al., 2019a), and evidence receptivity (Zmigrod et al., 2019b). Importantly, in line with horseshoe theories of political extremism, cognitive rigidity characterizes individuals on the extreme right and extreme left of the political spectrum (Zmigrod, Rentfrow, & Robbins, 2020; Figure 1A), showing that the extremity of the ideology may matter more than its content or mission. In the context of extreme political action, cognitive rigidity predicted a greater willingness to endorse violence to protect an ideological group or cause (Zmigrod et al., 2019c; Figure 1B), as well as a readiness to sacrifice one’s life to save other fellow ingroup members. Notably, individuals who had greater conviction or confidence in their decision to self-sacrifice for the sake of a broader ideological group tended to be more cognitively inflexible across multiple tasks. Individuals’ implicit dispositions in the domain of cognitive rigidity and flexibility can therefore play a significant role in political judgements and behaviors – acting as individual-level factors that augment or reduce the likelihood of engaging in political action. 5 Figure 1. (A) Inverted U-shaped curves in cognitive flexibility across three independent tasks, whereby individuals strongly fused either to the Democratic party (negative partisanship values) or Republican party (positive values) were less cognitively flexible than moderates on the Alternative Uses Test (AUT), Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), and Remote Associates Test (RAT). Reproduced with permission from Zmigrod, Rentfrow, & Robbins (2020). (B) Cognitively rigid participants were more likely to have strong conviction that they would be willing to die in order to save members of their ideological ingroup. Reproduced with permission from Zmigrod, Rentfrow, & Robbins (2019). Rigidity may also manifest in the context of metacognition, that is, the awareness of one’s cognitive capacities and processes. Difficulties in metacognition may drive individuals